Christina’s confessions
Inside the quirky star’s kooky world
She’s 37 now, but we’ll always have a 10-year-old version of Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams preserved in our minds.
The heart-shaped face has changed slightly and her dark locks are now a soft blonde, but the broad forehead, cute nose and unsettling gaze are still very recognisable.
The reality, of course, is that her career has also moved on from her years as a child star in TheAddamsFamily. In fact, in the last 27 years, she has made over 50 films.
Her most recent role is as Zelda Fitzgerald in Z:The
BeginningofEverything, based on the novel by Therese Anne Fowler. Zelda was a Southern belle who married US novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. It was the great, glamorous love affair of the jazz age, but ended badly with the writer’s descent into alcoholism and Zelda’s prolonged stays in mental hospitals. She died in a fire while locked in a room awaiting electroshock therapy at just 47.
Before doing her research for the TV series, which can be streamed on Amazon Prime, Christina says, “I’d just heard her represented as crazy – this one-sided, one-dimensional myth. It’s unfair that this woman’s legacy should be so maligned.”
It’s most likely, the star says, that Zelda and her husband were difficult people who didn’t bring out the best in each other. “They were equally bad for each other. I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think she was mentally ill. She was someone who was very smart and sensitive, and had the sort of problems that complicated people do.”
That Christina herself has maintained her sanity after 27 years in the film industry is something to marvel at. “Well, I lost it for a while,” she admits. “The sanity comes and goes, and then you get it back.”
Christina was the youngest of four siblings. Her mother was a model and her father was a therapist who used to conduct primal-scream therapy sessions in their basement. She recalls, “It was impossible to sleep – the yelling came up through the vents. I spent a lot of my childhood imitating those sessions for my mother, who thought I was hilarious.” Her parents divorced when she was 13 and she doesn’t see her father any more.
At nine years old, Christina landed a role in the hit 1990 movie with Cher playing her mother and Winona Ryder her sister. Her iconic part in TheAddamsFamily came soon after, for which the only direction she received was to express no emotion. “I was one of those kids who hated being told to smile. I would think, ‘Ew, go away!’ so I loved playing that part. We were a very dry, sarcastic family, so I was well disposed to it.”
Thindisguise
By the time she was 15, Christina had made eight films and decided to “try anorexia”. She recalls, “I was 14 and I felt very scrutinised. My reaction to that was to grab any control I could. If I was thin, nobody would be able to criticise my weight and if I was quiet, nobody would be able to criticise what I said. At that time, I didn’t speak either. I taught myself to always count to 10 before I spoke.” When threatened with hospital and a tube down her throat, Christina chose to eat.
Now the star lives her life mostly under the radar. She doesn’t go to premieres, except those of her own films, and fans didn’t know she was pregnant throughout 2014. “I didn’t keep it a secret – I just
didn’t make an announcement.”
Christina met her husband, cameraman James Heerdegen, in 2011. They married in 2013 and she fell pregnant a week later. When her son Freddie was two months old, she was back to work, playing the title role in
TheLizzieBordenChronicles. “I thought, ‘I have to keep going, otherwise I’ll notice how tired I am.’ It was hard, but I had a lot of help and a great breast pump.”
Being a young star has made Christina very protective of her own child. She doesn’t post pictures of him online and it makes her uncomfortable “when I see all these celebrities making their children famous because I know what happens when you commodify a child”.
Open and sincere, there is an air of self-containment about Christina that is reminiscent of something Zelda wrote in her only novel, SaveMetheWaltz. “She quietly expected great things to happen to her and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.”